Stadia Is Google's Cloud Gaming Service Using Linux, Vulkan & A Custom AMD GPU

Google used the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC 2019) to officially unveil "Stadia" as their cloud-based game streaming service formerly known as Project Stream.

To little surprise these days, the Google Stadia streaming service is built on Linux servers. Also to not a lot of surprise, Vulkan is their graphics API of choice for streaming right now up to 4K at 60FPS while they plan to expand to 8K at 120FPS in the future.

Google has developed their own optimized controller for gaming with Stadia, which includes extras like one-button access to YouTube streaming.

Google also revealed they partnered with AMD to develop a custom GPU for their data centers. That's good news and should further empower the open-source AMD Linux driver stack. Stadia hardware is backed by custom 2.7GHz processors and 16GB of RAM per instance.

Google's release target for public access to the Stadia game streaming service is simply "2019", but hopefully we won't be waiting too long before finding out more technical details on their foray into the increasingly crowded game streaming space.